How to Prove Your Professional Services are Valuable3 min read

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One of my current clients shared a very powerful new marketing idea with me and then I passed it on to some of my clients.

It’s too good NOT to share it with you! 

As I said in my email yesterday, marketing is 100% communication. And what you’re communicating about is the value of your services.

There are many ways to do this – You can discuss client outcomes, describe benefits, share advantages, offer testimonials, tell stories and make both logical and emotional arguments.

But this new marketing idea gives even more proof that your services are valuable. If you use an outside source to demonstrate the value, you gain more credibility and stature in the minds of your prospective clients.

The concept is really simple: Use “Marketing Data” to prove that your service is needed and valuable.

Market data is information that comes out of research that is readily available to everyone:

Market data includes evidence from such organizations as:

IBSWorld reports that there are 46,000 business coaching and training companies in the US with over 11 billion in revenue.

According to Zane Benefits, the cost of replacing someone in a highly-educated executive position paying $100K is as high as$213K.

An article in Harvard Business Review reports that about a quarter of the executives in acquired top management teams leave within the first year, a departure rate about three times higher than in comparable companies that haven’t been acquired.

I found all of this market data on Google in just a few minutes.

How do you use such data? You use it to make a stronger case for your services. Use it to show your clients that they may have a bigger problem than they realized.

So, for the three items above:

1. Use this data for clients who don’t think coaching is a well-established or valid business service. You now have proof this isn’t the case.

2. Use this data to demonstrate the high cost of attrition of top executives and how your retention services are a fraction of the cost of preventing just one executive from leaving.

3. When working with a company in the midst of a merger, use this data to discuss the approaching danger of their top executives leaving.

You can find valuable market data on just about any kind of business that can help you build a stronger case for your services. And the answers are as close as a Google search.

Without this data, you often won’t make a strong enough case that will convince your prospective clients to work with you.

In sharing these ideas in my Marketing Mastery Program, Sara Jane Radin, an Executive Leadership Coach who works with abrasive leaders, added this paragraph to the home page of her website:

The costs associated with Abrasive Leaders are staggering. The Workplace Bullying Institute had estimated that between turnover and lost productivity an Abrasive Leader could cost a Fortune 500 company an astounding $24,000,000; add another $1.4 Million for litigation and settlement costs.  While all of the exact costs are not easy to calculate, it is clear that the costs are huge and, therefore, do indeed negatively affect the bottom line.

If that doesn’t get her prospective clients’ attention, I don’t know what will!

Remember, people don’t work with you because you’re brilliant and have excellent services. They hire you because you can make things better for them.

But you have to prove it!

By the way, when you’re reading online content this week, notice the content that incorporates market data. Notice how much persuasive this is and how much you trust this content as opposed to content that doesn’t contain it.

Cheers, Robert

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